I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Friday, November 30, 2012

DJIBOUTI – The Organisation of
Islamic Cooperation (OIC) called Saturday for the international community to
protect Muslims in Myanmar’s unrest-hit Rakhine state from genocide as US
President Barack Obama readied for a landmark trip to the country.“We
expect the United States to convey a strong message to the government of Burma
so they protect that minority, what is going on there is a genocide,” said
Djibouti’s Foreign Minister Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, who is the acting chairman of
the OIC.

“We
are telling things how they are, we believe that the United States and other
countries should act quickly to save that minority which is submitted to an
oppressive policy and a genocide,” he said at the end of an OIC foreign
ministers’ meeting in Djibouti.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

(This post includes the translated script and the video of meeting
between the anti-Chinese Copper Mine protesters and government ministers led by
U Aung Min on 25 November.)

Thwe Thwe Win the so-called Iron-Lady, now
behind bars in notorious Insein Prison for
illegal occupation of private properties and
obstruction of justice.

The so-called Iron Ladies, as labelled
by New York Times’s Thomas Fuller in his articles, were now behind bars in
Burma’s notorious Insein Prison after being teargased, firebombed, and arrested
at the Chinese Copper Mine site near Monywa in Middle Burma.

And more than 100 Buddhist monks
and farmers protesting at the mine site were injured or burned. Some were so
badly burnt they ended up at nearby Monywa and Mandalay hospitals.

So, after showing
extraordinary restraint last few months, what triggered President Thein Sein’s
so-called reformist government to unleash a brutal strike against the
anti-Chinese copper mine protesters led by the so-called Iron Ladies, a couple
of landless peasants from the villages destroyed by the Chinese Copper Mine?

Beginning at 3 in the early
morning of November 29 more than 500 Burmese Police had charged at the six illegal
protesting camps inside the Letpandaung Copper Mine area and broken the camps
and arrested the protesters by using overwhelming force backed by fire engines
and teargas.

Burma’s Interior Ministry
has earlier issued an ultimatum to the protesting monks and local farmers to
fold their camps and leave the area by the midnight of 27 November, but the more
than a thousand protestors had refused to follow the government order.

WETHMAY, MYANMAR — They were trailed by plainclothes police officers and
called “cows” by government officials. They spent four nights in prison until a
public outcry prompted their release.

Aye Net and Thwe Thwe Win, the
daughters of farmers whose education stopped at primary school, have rocketed
to national prominence in Myanmar for their defiance of a copper mining project
run by the powerful Myanmar military and its partner, a subsidiary of a Chinese
arms manufacturer.

“Whatever
pressure they put on us, we won’t give up,” Ms. Thwe Thwe Win said in an
interview in her village on the edge of the copper mine. “I want them to shut
this project down completely.”

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

I knew almost nothing about
Belgium till I did my master degree in 1985-86 and ended up with a blue-eyed
blond-haired Belgian professor as my thesis advisor.

From him I learned about
beautiful Belgium and her French-speaking Wallonian people and Dutch-speaking Flemish
people and of course the truly European Capital the Brussels. That was more than
twenty five years ago.

Back then I would be truly
shocked if someone told me that in short 20 years time the 40% of Brussels’s
population would eventually be recent Muslim immigrants demanding the
truly-democratic Belgium be drastically turned into an Islamic republic like
that truly-repressive Iran the pariah of the civilized world and the
utter-degrader of women.

But that is what exactly
happening in Belgium right now if one believes what conservative Europeans are
now loudly and alarmingly claiming like in the following article from the
conservative Gatestone Institute and the following one from BREITBART.

The ongoing protests against
the largest mining project in Burma has been turned into anti-China and anti-Military
protests by leftwing student union activists and local peasant activists with
the support of foreign-NGOs-backed watermelon-environmentalists.

The mining project is the
Letpandoung Copper Mine near Monywa in Sagaing Division of middle Burma. The project
is owned and operated by Myanmar-Wan Bao Mining Company the joint venture
between Chinese Government-owned Wan Bao Mining and Burma Military-owned Myanmar
Economic Holdings widely known in Burma as Oo-Baing.

Monday, November 26, 2012

On a hot
Sunday night in a remote Myanmar village, Tun Naing punched his wife and
unleashed hell. She wanted rice for their three children. He said they
couldn't afford it. Apartheid-like restrictions had prevented Muslims like Tun
Naing from working for Buddhists here in Rakhine State along Myanmar's western
border, costing the 38-year-old metalworker his job.

The couple
screamed at each other. Tun Naing threw another punch. Neighbors joined in the
row. The commotion stirred up ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in the next
village, who began shouting anti-Muslim slurs. Relations between the two
communities were already so tense that six soldiers were stationed nearby. Tun
Naing's village was soon besieged by hundreds of Rakhines. And Myanmar was
plunged into a week of sectarian violence that by official count claimed 89 lives,
its worst in decades.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Two men have been sentenced over the pack rape of a woman
snatched off an Auckland street but police says another two are still on the
loose.

Abdinor Abdi, 29, and Mohamed
Bashir, 25, were sentenced in the High Court at Auckland today to 16 and 15
years in prison respectively for their part in the continued rape of the woman.

Neither will be eligible for
parole until they served at least half of their sentences. A jury earlier found
them guilty of rape and three counts of being party to rape. Abdi was also
convicted of abduction and threats to kill.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

A Sri Lankan
youth employed as a domestic aid has been arrested in Saudi Arabia for
worshiping a statue of the Buddha, which is considered an offence according to
Shariah law.

According to the Bodu Bala Senaa,
the youth bearing passport no. 2353715 identified as Premanath Pereralage
Thungasiri has been arrested by Umulmahami Police, which is a grave situation.

The organisation states that
information has been received regarding a plan that is underway to behead a Sri
Lankan youth employed in domestic service in Saudi Arabia. Although a complaint
has been lodged at the Foreign Employment Bureau, Battaramulla, under complaint
no: CN/158/1205, so far no action has been taken.

Friday, November 23, 2012

To most Saudis, Burma was almost
an unknown country, until the news ofmassacreof Rohingya Muslims came out.Intheir vacation and on the street,
Saudis run across men in orange attire, who are soft spoken and appear to be
gentle and peaceful, with pamphlets and flyers in their hands about Buddhism,
giving them away to pedestrians.

These Buddhists appear as if they cannot hurt a fly,
while the pictures coming outfromBurma are very graphic and heart
wrenching.

Children being grilled naked and alive; corpses amputated with
hatchets; anddead bodiesof men, women and children, young and old
scattered everywhere.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Upper Burma has seen a
demographic shift resulting from the recent immigration of many Mainland Chinese
to Mandalay Region, Shan, and Kachin States. Ethnic Chinese now constitute an
estimated 30 to 40% of Mandalay's population.

Huge swaths of land in city
centre left vacant by the fires were later purchased, mostly by the ethnic
Chinese, many of whom were recent immigrants from Yunnan. The Chinese influx
accelerated after the current military government came to power in 1988.

Monday, November 19, 2012

PRESIDENT OBAMA:
Thank you. (Applause.) Myanmar Naingan, Mingalaba! (Laughter
and applause.) I am very honored to be here at this university and to be
the first President of the United States of America to visit your country.

I
came here because of the importance of your country. You live at the
crossroads of East and South Asia. You border the most populated nations
on the planet. You have a history that reaches back thousands of years,
and the ability to help determine the destiny of the fastest growing region of
the world.

I
came here because of the beauty and diversity of your country. I have
seen just earlier today the golden stupa of Shwedagon, and have been moved by
the timeless idea of metta -- the belief that our time on this Earth can be defined
by tolerance and by love. And I know this land reaches from the crowded
neighborhoods of this old city to the homes of more than 60,000 villages; from
the peaks of the Himalayas, the forests of Karen State, to the banks of the
Irrawady River.

Burma’s inflation is only
2.82% but the Union Bank’s benchmark interest rate is 10%. And the businesses
and banking experts and economists are calling the Union Bank to reduce the
benchmark rate as many businesses are facing tough environment for their long
term survival amidst explosively growing carry trades.

According to the banking
experts current inflation rate is much less than 3% and Burma desperately needs
to reduce the high interest rates. Dr. Khin San Yee, the deputy union minister
for the National Planning and Economic Development Ministry, said on November 5
that the inflation rate on 2011-2012 financial year was only 2.82%.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

(In
the evening of October 18, 2012 at the 67th Alfred E. Smith
Foundation Dinner in New York the President of United States Barrack Hussein
Obama pulled a funny joke on himself. And when I read the following article “In Visit to Myanmar, Obama Will See a Nation That Shaped His Grandfather”by Peter Baker in The New York Times on
November 17, 2012 about Obama’s coming visit to Burma his self-inflicted joke
immediately came into my mind.)

President Obama, Archbishop Dolan, and Mitt Romeny.

WASHINGTON — When President Obama lands in Yangon on Monday, he will be the first sitting American president to visit the country now known as Myanmar. But he will not be the first Obama to visit.

The president’s Kenyan
grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, spent part ofWorld War IIin what was then called Burma as a
cook for a British Army captain. Although details are sometimes debated, the
elder Mr. Obama’s Asian experience proved formative just as his grandson’s time
growing up in Indonesia did decades later.

The average educated citizen could perhaps
be forgiven for thinking that global warming is a relatively minor problem; how
can individuals take it seriously when the media and the world's governments
ignore it?

As Dr. Hansen elaborates, that is because
the supposedly democratic systems of government now commonplace have simply
resulted in the best governments that money can buy. It turns out that the oil,
gas and coal industries have more than enough money to bend practically any
government to their will with promises of cheap energy, industrial growth and
jobs.

Monday, November 12, 2012

The cross-border attack on
November 6 by Bengali-Muslim terrorists from RSO (Rohingya Solidarity
Organization), the OIC-supported and Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group based
in Bangladesh, killed one engineering officer from Burma army.

According to the NarinjaraNews Agency the Rohingya terrorists have also kidnapped three Burma army soldiers
and fled back into Bangladesh. The cross-border terrorist attack took
place in the Maungdaw Township of north Arakan.

The news leaked from the
army circle in Maungdaw described the terrorist attack as an ambush on a 13-men
unarmed construction team from Burma Army General Engineering unit building the
Burma-Bangladesh Friendly Road on the borderline in the area known as Na-Sa-Ka
Territory (1).

Thursday, November 8, 2012

First
part of this post is Thomas Fuller’s article in New York Times criticizing the native Yakhine Buddhists in Arakan for intolerance towards the world famous charity
MSF or Doctors Without Borders, and hindering MSF’s aid works in Arakan of Burma.

Second
part is an article written by Tin Win Myint a Yakhine Buddhist journalist explaining why
his people are really angry at MSF for their taking side of the Bengali Muslims
illegally entering Arkan State and grabbing the traditional lands and fishing
grounds of Native Yakhine Buddhists after slaughtering the native Buddhists.

Third part is the original letter in Burmese released by the All Yakhine Native Refugee Committees (Sittwe) stating their refusal to accept any foreign aids from the UN and other INGOs in Burma and the direct translation of the letter.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

(Chapter XII of Narrative of The Burmese War by Major John
Snodgrass, British Army, the Military Secretary to the Commander of the British
expeditionary force and the Assistant Political Agent in Ava.)

British March from Rangoon to Danubyu (February 1825).

The retreat of Maha Bandoola left the field
completely open in our front. Not a man in arms remained in the neighbourhood
of Rangoon; and numbers of the people, at length released from military
restraint, and convinced of the superiority of the British troops over their
countrymen, and of their clemency and kindness to the vanquished, poured daily
into Rangoon: even those who had borne arms gave up the cause as hopeless, and
returned with their families from a life of suffering and oppression, to the
blessings of quiet and undisturbed domestic happiness.

Friday, November 2, 2012

(This post is direct translation of articles from the Myanmar Military Site.)

Hill O-Seven is a low non-descript
hill straddling the disputed borderline between Thailand and Burma. Approximately
at 2,500 yards south-east from the Hill O-7 is the bustling Thai border town called
Mae Sai.

The low hill, near Pone-htun
Ward of Tarchileik the Burmese border town opposite the Thai border town Mae
Sai, was designated as the Objective-7 during the Burmese military offensive to
drive the Koumington (White-Chinese) forces out of Burma during the 1950s.
Since then the hill has been known as Hill O-7 and as an important high-ground
overlooking both Tarchileik and Mae Sai Burma army has always taken a strong
defensive position on the hill.